Nokia is still rolling out Qt and they estimate by end of year it will be market of .5 billion phones. So Ovi + Qt is a very real market for at least the next few years. Meanwhile Microsoft transition hasn't even begun.
Where are you getting the 50M/month number from? The latest number reported by Google (Eric Schmidt at a MWC keynote this week) was 350k a day, which would be about 10 million a month.
(Though you are right in that given the kind of growth the smartphone market is going through, installed base is quickly going to be irrelevant and what matters is new sales).
New sales will only matter up to a certain point. Once the market is saturated you can't tell if a new sale is someone newly adopting your platform, or just someone that is moving from one phone to another while remaining on your platform.
you can't tell if a new sale is someone newly adopting your platform, or just someone that is moving from one phone to another while remaining on your platform
I'm sure Google or Apple can tell, since activating Android or iOS involves linking it with Google or iTunes account.
But new sales are usually numbers in terms of new phones that people bought, not numbers on how many of them just activated their phone for the first time. Buying your phone is a sale. Activating your iOS or Google account is not.
I'm in Hokkaido in Japan right now and struck by how slow the speed limits are, even in a rural area with wide straight roads. People get used to driving slow when they are forced to, and society benefits from fewer accidents.
Not sure this deserves the excitement of the headline. Amazon's been trolling for mobile developers for months now, and there are many other app stores doing the same.
The question is which ones will get enough traction with consumers to matter.
